Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

Thurber’s line is a comic inversion of Benjamin Franklin’s earnest proverb about industrious habits (“Early to bed and early to rise…”). By appending “and dead,” he punctures the moral certainty that disciplined routines guarantee prosperity and well-being. The joke implies that relentless self-improvement and regimented living can be joyless, even self-defeating—at best producing a life that is merely efficient, at worst one that ends sooner or feels prematurely “dead.” The substitution of “male” for “man” also gives the quip a mock-scientific, pseudo-objective tone, as if reducing human flourishing to a biological formula. Overall, it exemplifies Thurber’s skeptical humor about American aphorisms and the cult of productivity.